Posted by Rory Brown in
Tuesday, August 5. 2008
Have you ever noticed that sometimes you can't seem to find information that you read somewhere once. I have noticed recently that places on the internet make it difficult or impossible to look back on old information that you might have seen. It's public information suddenly being made private. Take, for instance, an Ebay auction. I noticed that you can't look at what an auction started at, even though at some point this information was easily available as public information, most notable when the auction immediately started. So, if you wanted to see the auction start price, you no longer can. To my knowledge, Ebay doesn't want you to see this after it has passed. This is just an example of information that was publicly available, but suddenly is hidden privately from you. I think it's a strange thing to think about.
If you have ever read the book 1984, it is similar to the Ministry of Truth changing the records of the past in order to make Big Brother seem all-knowing. Perhaps this is something primitive in our society that we subconsciously look for in a larger system. Do we enjoy the deceit?
